Marketing Strategies and Customer Satisfaction: A Study on the Higher Education Institutions in Johor

The future of education industry is dependent on the university’s ability to develop an effective marketing strategies, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. Marketing strategies are the plans that enables university to achieve competitive advantage. Therefore, this study examines the relationship between marketing strategies, namely packaging, relationship marketing, price, and brand image and customer satisfaction at the higher education institutions in Johor, Malaysia. Questionnaires were distributed to 90 students who currently studying in universities in Johor, Malaysia. SmartPLS 3.0 (M3) was applied to test the hypotheses and subsequently bootstrapping was conducted to investigate the standard error of the estimate and t-values. The findings indicated that relationship marketing and price have positive relationship with customer satisfaction. On the other hand, findings revealed that packaging and brand image does not show positive relationship on customer satisfaction. It is believed that packaging has a short lifespan and the respondents does not really concern about the popularity of the brand. There is limited research on this topic to guide the universities to cope up with the current situation. Thus, this research findings have provided significant insights that help stakeholders to better strategize and position universities, particularly in the scenario of Johor, Malaysia.